For managing antimicrobial preservation of a larger system or sump, ATP testing allows for a rapid assessment to be made in a manner that supplements Quality Control programs. The important aspects of a program, whether by ASTM E2649 or other similar bio-load measurement strategies, are as follows:

Establish a baseline of acceptable performance, or Quality Control parameters. Having a baseline is critical to knowing the ‘HOW’ in “How bad is it?” Because of the nature of ATP testing, without an established quality control baseline, the data generated can be highly influenced by many factors that may or may not reflect the actual biological load in a given test system or test formulation.

Setup a test series that measures across suspect variables; in terms of antimicrobial performance or microbiological properties, that could include:

time of day due to temperature changes

day of the week due to cycling or formulation remixing

month to month due to seasonal variability

operator variability

equipment usage variability

Having the Quality Control parameters in place for the MWF systems antimicrobial performance is the first key step. Additional considerations that can provide much better system control and more effective cost control of the MWF system are:

Analytic measurements of the actual antimicrobial concentration over time

Microorganism (bacteria or fungal) control organism control thresholds (upper and lower limits of microbial counts)

ASTM E2694 provides a solid framework for measuring ATP abundance in metal working fluid systems. By considering a more complete range of microbial performance parameters, utilizing ATP measurements or other methods of analysis can provide a solid foundation for controlling very large MWF systems.

For more information about ASTM E2694 and Performance testing, contact our antimicrobial lab at 847-483-9950 or info@situtest.com.